The Weeping Woman On Streets Of Prague

a haunting classic Madeleine Kingsley in She Magazine An intricate, finely crafted and polished tale, The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague brings magic-realism to the dimly lit streets of Prague. Through the squares and alleys a woman walks, the embodiment of human pity, sorrow, death. Everyone she passes is touched by her, and Germain skilfully creates an intense mood and feel in her attempt to produce a spiritual map of Prague. The Observer

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia. Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítĕzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

In this wide-ranging, challenging theoretical study, Julian Wolfreys offers close readings of films, novels and poetry in order to draw attention to the ways in which texts resist acts of reading by performing their own idiomatic, wayward identities. Looking at the construction of identity in Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Joyce, Maya Deren, Sylvie Germain, Jacques Derrida, Michel Deguy, and George Eliot, Wolfreys asks the reader to reassess the textual performance of identity by attending to a rhetoric which is simultaneously both resistant to mastery and affirmative of dissonance.

A treasure house of Gothic, baroque and modernist architecture, Prague is also a city of icons and symbols: statues, saints and signs reveal a turbulent history of religious and cultural conflict. As Kafka's nightmare city and home of the Good Soldier Svejk, the Czech capital also produced two of the twentieth century's emblematic writers. Richard Burton explores this metropolis of theatrical allusion, in which politics and drama have always been intertwined. His interpretation of the city's cultural past and present encompasses opera and rock music, puppetry and cinema, surrealism and socialist realism.

'It has been a long while in Italian fiction since such an authentic and engaging voice has appeared.' Bruno Quaranta in La Stampa 'This memoir of four generations of a family provides a vivid and eloquent picture of Italian life stretching from the late 19th century, when the peasant lifestyle had changed little from medieval times, up to the consumer culture of the 1950s. It’s a saga that embraces characters like Maria, who emigrated to the USA for an unwise marriage, returning a few years later with a daughter and paralysis down one side of her body, and the author’s father, Angelo, a feckless chap who was interned in a German POW camp. In writing about her female-dominated family, some of whom she is old enough to remember – most notably the matriarchal grandmother Ninin – Giacobino imbues her account with a real sense of intimacy. She has a powerful feel for traditional Italian culture, her early chapters conjuring up a time when the hierarchy of the family was the only true reality, fairness was unknown and “a moment’s tenderness must last a week”. Alastair Mabbutt in The Herald 'An epic novel, which is the story of an Italy which no longer exists, becomes the portrait of a family. It is a novel which touches the heart.' Valeria Parrella in Grazie Beautifully and sympathetically evoking the intense world of working-class Turin, this story is a pleasure to read. The Catholic Herald '... well written and a fascinating read. I learned a great deal about aspects of Italian social history through the eyes of this one family. The translation is clever too, trying to keep a flavour of Piedmontese dialect while making sure English-speaking readers are not alienated by the use of too many foreign words. The characters are all vividly portrayed, from Ninin’s drunken and predatory grandfather, to the various aunts, and down to happy-go-lucky dog Pucci. .' The Historical Novel Society Review A warm and direct story, memorable for its vivid description and depth of cultural understanding. Thomas Tallon in The Tablet 'It's like a rural version of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan saga . It’s a powerful and atmospheric record of largely unexplored terrain.' Margaret Drabble's Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement

Rodinsky's world was that of the East European Jewry, cabbalistic speculation, an obsession with language as code and terrible loss. He touched the imagination of artist Rachel Lichtenstein, whose grandparents had left Poland in the thirties. This text weaves together Lichtenstein's quest for Rodinsky -which took her to Poland, to Israel and around Jewish London -with Iain Sinclair's meditations on her journey into her own past, and on the Whitechapel he has reinvented.

Deconstruction - Derrida contests the notion that what Jacques Derrida does can be turned into a theory for literary interpretation. It also questions the idea that there is a critical methodology called deconstruction which can be applied to literary texts in a programmatic fashion. In this introductory study to the work of Jacques Derrida, Julian Wolfreys introduces the reader to a range of Derrida's interests and concerns, while offering readings, informed by Derrida's thought, of canonical and less well-known literary works.

This book can be read forwards or backwards, either from A to Z or from Z to A; thus you will realize that the micro world described in this text is a wheel of fortune and a magical sphere. Fortune is changeable and magic sometimes reverses its spells against us. In whatever way you choose to read these pages, you will find more questions than answers concerning the human zoo described within. The unnatural environment of the cities shows us that men and women are capable of the most admirable, as well as the most horrible behaviours. Here you will find an example of how, under both predictable and unpredictable circumstances, the love of a woman can transform itself into hatred, leading her to commit unthinkable actions.

The main aim of the book has been to include writers, movements, forms of writing and textual strategies, critical ideas, and texts that are significant in relation to postmodernist literature. In addition, important scholars, journals, and cultural processes have been included where these are felt to be relevant to an understanding of postmodernist writing. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the postmodernist literature and theater.